At this point, there’s an almost infinite amount of content out there by or about Tony Robbins. But I recently listened to a podcast that’s in my rotation where he was a guest, and this particular piece of Robbins’ content was even more eye opening for a variety of reasons. The craziest reason was just how applicable so many of his talking points actually were to how we play this silly little game of Best Ball. As you probably know, Robbins is arguably the greatest motivational speaker on planet earth. He’s also a genius businessman and investor. I’ve known this, and I’ve consumed his content plenty before. If you look at his twitter bio, he’s the self-proclaimed #1 Life & Business strategist in the nation. And despite that fact, and the fact that best ball is entirely a strategy game, it wasn’t until this particular episode where I really felt this applicability to how we conquer Best Ball from his ideas.
As I got to the end of the episode, I found myself with all these applications of life or business concepts Tony was discussing for best ball and fantasy sports as a whole. And it just hits you –
This is how Tony Robbins would draft Best Ball teams.
If Tony Robbins Drafted Best Ball Teams, This Is How He’d Do It
Fully Immerse Yourself
Probably the thing that I’ve always appreciated the most about Robbins is the fact he comes from humble beginnings. You see so many successful people out there who started on 2nd or even 3rd base, and admittedly it can be subconsciously (or even consciously) discouraging or off-putting to take in a lecture from someone with that perspective. If you’re like me, you come from beginnings more like Tony. You had to work for everything, and you had to go through your own set of tough times to achieve your goals.
So while we may resonate with that perspective, the lesson and template that he delivers often centers around this idea of immersion. He says that he even thinks of learning as immersion. How do you dig your way out from the bottom, how do you become skilled at something, etc. We all want to be great at the things we are passionate about or care about, but there really are no shortcuts. If Tony were going to try to become the greatest best ball player in the world, he would immerse himself in this game. Because that’s precisely what he does in every other successful area of his life, as well as he what he teaches and motivates others to do.
“It’s why I do 12 hours a day for 3 or 4 days in a row when most people wouldn’t sit through a 3 hour movie.”, he says in reference to his seminars.
The most successful strategist on the planet believes the best way to become good at something is to fully immerse yourself in it, but we often think we can watch a video or two, get a few picks from some tout and go make a bunch of money at this game. I also loved this concept –
“If you’re going to learn a language, and you try to learn a little at a time in high school or college, most people don’t end up speaking the language. But if I took you to Italy, dropped you off in Rome for 90 days without a teacher, you’re going to be speaking Italian when I picked you up.”
Obviously, we don’t need to spend every waking hour thinking and studying Best Ball. But the lesson still remains. This is a strategy game for money, similar to investing or building a business. And the best way to win those games is immersion. This one is no different.
Reps, Reps, Reps
We’re all human. We’re all busy. We’re all probably lazy sometimes. We want the answers. Especially in fantasy football, that’s what so many folks are looking for. Go look at all the content out there in this space.
“Draft these 5 Sleepers to CRUSH Your Fantasy Draft”
“The UNSTOPPABLE draft strategy to use on Underdog Fantasy”
“Become a fantasy football expert in just FIVE minutes with these Tips”
And all the silly clickbait-y content that’s out there. Trust me, as a content creator, I get it. You have to play the game. But it’s also what the casual consumer is seeking out.
That’s why someone like Tony Robbins could come in and crush this game of Best Ball. Because he wouldn’t seek out the “get rich quick” ideas. He would focus on getting reps. And more reps. And more reps.
He & Shaan give an awesome example of this with Steph Curry. Steph is the greatest shooter in the history of basketball, but you couldn’t just ask him how to become a good shooter. Sure, he would have some tips that wouldn’t hurt, but he’s not going to turn you into a great shooter from a bad shooter. Because the only real answer to becoming good at basically anything… is a massive amount of reps.
The amount of reps Steph Curry puts in to become a master at his craft is mind boggling. Steph has always been a great shooter dating back to High School and his days at Davidson, but his Dad made him change the form on his jump shot to create a more optimal form to become great in the NBA. From then on, all Steph did was pile up reps. Not including games, Steph started taking 500 shots per day. That’s 3,500 shots per week. 168,000 shots per year. So, in his 15 years in the NBA, he’s taking over 2.5 MILLION shots just in practice. Meanwhile, he’s taken just 15,000 shots in his career in games. He’s made just 3,000 3 pointers in his career to become the best of all time. 2.5 million reps to achieve 3,000 successful attempts in a game.
Less than 1/10th of 1% of Steph’s shots have actually shown up in a game. But as Tony says, “you’re rewarded in public for what you practice in private.”
And in a hilariously bizarre way, that couldn’t be more true about Best Ball. Your entire season in best ball is going to be decided by 1, 2 or if you’re really lucky 3 teams. If you’re drafting a large quantity of teams, that’s a minuscule percentage. I drafted ~ 500 best ball teams for the 2023 season (on UD and DK). Just 2 of them made it to the finals of a tournament in Week 17. One of those had a really strong finish in BBM4. That was the “public reward”. But I had to draft hundreds and hundreds of teams, many of which were downright terrible, to get to that point.
Most fantasy bros won’t spend an extra few minutes to look up some stats by themselves. Or get some extra drafts in. Which is totally fine! It’s a fun hobby for most of us, and we don’t want it to turn into a chore. Of course, there are monetary restrictions as well. We don’t have infinite funds to spend on this hobby. But there are lots of low dollar entry fee tournaments out there now in this space. And as Tony said in this podcast episode, you do have to spend the money to achieve your goals sometimes. If it’s worth it to you, just as it was for him when he used an entire week’s pay to go to a motivational seminar early in his career, you’l find a way and make the commitment.
But seriously, if Tony Robbins (or Steph Curry) were playing Best Ball, can you imagine how many teams they’d be drafting to get their practice in?
Ask the Questions No One Else Will Ask
One of my favorite quotes from the above podcast episode was “Smart people ask the questions no one else will ask.”
It came from a rather hilarious investment story, where someone was asking the question “Where can I find the investment that is so asymmetrical there is no downside, and there’s huge upside immediately.” Most people would say that’s an idiotic question. It doesn’t exist.
But through the sheer exercise of asking this question one individual actually found two distinct investment opportunities that no one else found. One was betting against the housing marking during the mortgage crisis of 2008 when everyone thought that was a truly insane thing to do. The second was by investing in nickels. Yes, nickels.
It’s a great story (imagine truckloads of nickels), but it’s a brilliant lesson for Best Ball as well. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud about with Spike Week. The entire community is willing to ask just about any question. Can you draft just 1 QB on a best ball team? Can you reach on players way ahead of ADP? All sorts of questions that are completely scoffed at by the entire industry. I drafted a team into the Weekly Winners tournament on Underdog this year that only had 1 QB and 1 TE. And they were Sam Howell and Cole Turner. I posted it on twitter. Needless to say, the responses were… not positive.
And who knows if that strategy was good or not, but in a completely new strategy game, I was willing to ask certain questions, and, in turn, try certain things out that absolutely no one else is willing to do. We are trying to find our investment in nickels, but 99.9% of this space will never consider asking the questions it takes to find them. It’s our biggest edge.
Which also reminded me of another quote I heard the other day that I absolutely fell in love with from Matt Damon.
Who knew Ben Affleck was this profound, especially at age 20. The guy with one of the most legendary memes of all time looking miserable smoking a cigarette. Crazy. But that concept is SO true, particularly for Best Ball. Most ideas are going to be bad. If we all just came up with the very best idea every single time, it probably would have already been discovered. As Aflleck said, “Judge me for how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are.”
Best Ball is so new. We are still just a few years into this game, and we are getting new formats, game types, rule changes and so on every single year. And the specifics of the game already make it nearly impossible to “solve”. So if we aren’t working through tons and tons of ideas trying to find our edges, we are doing ourselves a disservice. And in order to do that, we are going to encounter bad ideas. Our very own Rob Coakley drafted a solo Patrick Mahomes team in a $1,000 buy-in tournament on Underdog this year AND recorded every pick he made and the logic behind it on YouTube. While I liked it, the YouTuber commentors… did not. Was it a good idea? Ultimately, we can’t say 100% for sure, but the YouTube bros were unwilling to even listen to an idea they thought was bad.
And often the bad ideas, or the questions no one else will ask, are what lead you to the good ideas. It also often leads you to the truly groundbreaking ideas that lead to massive success (like investing all your money in nickels or creating Good Will Hunting).
Portfolio Diversification – but not how you think
8-12 uncorrelated assets. The key is uncorrelated, and asset.
Diversification is one of the more controversial subjects in our little Best Ball bubble. How much is too much to draft of a certain player? Should I flatten out my exposures or take big stands?
Unsurprisingly, Robbins has an insight into this subject that is both fascinating and unique, at least relative to these kind of conversations we saw in our Best Ball bubble.
In the investment and business world, Robbins learned that the most successful people have a different asset allocation than everyone else, and they also have a different asymmetrical risk/reward. In particular, Ray Dalio highlighted the ‘holy grail of investing’, which made a huge lightbulb go off in my head.
In order for people to get what they want financially (or in best ball), they have to compound. But in order to get the higher rates of return, you have to take bigger risks. Higher risk, higher return. That’s the exact same problem in Best Ball. We all want the highest reward. We want to win millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we also don’t want to lose it all. Or we don’t want to take on the level of risk that truly maximizes that return potential (I.E. huge player stands or huge player fades, etc).
But Ray discovered something largely from a mathematical perspective that was the ‘ah-ha!’ moment for me. He says, “If we can find 8-12 uncorrelated assets, you can reduce your risk by 80% and still make a slight increase in your upside.” But the key is that ever so important word – uncorrelated.
That part is so critical because from an investment standpoint, so many things are actually correlated. And that’s also true for Best Ball. When we invest in certain assets in Best Ball, the majority of the time there is some kind of correlation between the different assets in our portfolio. The simplest one is a QB and his pass catchers. If we invest more heavily into Lamar Jackson (I.E. he’s one of our 8-12 assets), we can’t also make Mark Andrews one of our 8-12 assets because they are very clearly correlated. I chose this specific example because that’s exactly what I did this past draft summer. I saw the Ravens offense as one I particularly wanted to invest in heavily. They were one of my core 8-12 assets, which generally makes Lamar Jackson the core asset. Now, maybe you think JK Dobbins is the core asset in that equation, and that’s totally fine. The problem for me was that I ended up with about 4 different Ravens as core assets – Lamar, Andrews, Dobbins and Rashod Bateman. Clearly, if everything worked out perfectly, having that major investment in all of those pieces could create a massive return. If they all stay healthy and the Ravens are as good on offense as I expected, that could be a huge return. But using Ray’s idea, I can still generate the necessary upside through just making Lamar Jackson a core asset in this instance while negating 80% of the risk that comes with a big bet on the Ravens offense. It is not 100% apples to apples thanks to the positional nuances of this game, but I think the point still remains.
And it’s important to note this isn’t saying to NOT take big player stands. It’s NOT saying to blindly smooth our your player exposures. It’s actually saying quite the opposite. It’s specifically saying that you need to identify 8-12 core assets that are the foundation of your portfolio. Those should be bigger stands. You HAVE to introduce some risk into your portfolio from a core asset perspective if you want to have access to the high end returns (aka winning a best ball tournament). So, when you hear individuals saying to smooth out your exposures for not other purposes than mitigating risk, that’s not necessarily helping you, and it’s probably actively hurting your chances at winning a tournament.
The flip side, however, is also true, which is where I think I have made my personal mistakes. I have always believed passionately in the “core asset” idea, where you need to take on risk in your portfolio from an exposure perspective to create higher potential returns. The problem was that there was a better way to do, and it was this idea of correlation. We often think of correlation as a great thing in best ball. We want to stack QBs with pass catchers, or we want to load up on an offense or even correlate a week 17 matchup. And that is definitely still a lever we can and should pull in our drafts. But from a portfolio perspective, it likely makes more sense not to make those correlations each core assets in your portfolio because we can have our cake and eat it too.
Instead of Lamar, Andrews, Dobbins and Bateman all being core assets for me, I could have access a very strong potential return (or tournament wining upside) by making Lamar a core asset, but having uncorrelated RB/WR/TE core assets (I.E. David Montgomery, George Kittle and Nico Collins instead). It’s funny because when we are in the weeds actually completing a draft, it feels like the correlation is always the way to go. But from a portfolio perspective, it can lead to a suboptimal approach if we aren’t cognizant of the impacts of both elements.
Give, but Not to Get
The very last thing is a bit more on the human side than the success side, but I think it’s possible it’s the most important. Tony tells a great story about how life changing it was more him when he gave money to a young boy in need, despite the fact that he was completely broke and had absolutely no idea what he was going to do in a current low point of his life.
At the end of the day, Best Ball is a competitive space. We really are all competing against one another for monetary gains. And yet, I think the best thing we can do is still to give to those in the community. You’ll probably hear or see some folks talk about now wanting to give away their edge. I understand the point, and it’s up to each person with how they want to proceed. But I think you’ll be surprised what you can actually gain from embracing the community and opening yourself up to give your thoughts and advice to others. Some of the greatest thoughts and ideas I’ve had in the last 3 years focusing on this game have been just chopping it up with other people, whether it be in the Spike Week discord, on a live stream or even in private conversations.
No one has it all figured out, and similar to how Tony ended up growing exponentially as a person from giving even when it probably didn’t feel like the best thing for him to do, it can end up leading to significantly more impactful gains than whatever edge you think you’re hoarding.
